After the meeting held by the Presidential Commission with bondholders and creditors at the Palacio Blanco of Miraflores, Caracas, the Venezuelan government issued an official communiqué to make known the start of the national external debt refinancing process.

The entire communiqué is presented below:

The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela would like to inform the world that today, at the Miraflores Presidential Palace, the refinancing process of Venezuela’s external debt was initiated with resounding success, as a strategy to fully comply with our obligations, despite the attempts of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – which is under the Treasury Department of Trump’s administration – to prevent it, as it seeks to attack the Venezuelan economy and hinder what has been a constant feature of our Homeland with regard to its commitments: we have honored them, regardless of the difficulties we face and the blockades that they attempt to perpetrate with malicious intentions.

In the last 36 months, Venezuela has cancelled the amount of 73,359 million dollars, in concept of reimbursed capital and paid interests; a notable increase in country risk levels by risk rating agencies has been an immediate consequence of each payment and each financial fulfillment. These risk rating agencies have been deeply inefficient to prevent outrageous financial failures in financial power centers in the United States, Europe, and Asia, but they are used as instruments of devious action against our country: the more we have paid – even though we have always been punctual in honoring our payments – the risk rating agencies, following the pattern of financial blockade undertaken by Trump’s administration, increase through reports which bereft of any form of rigor and veracity, the cost of our debt and hinder Venezuela’s reputation as a solvent country, as well as they hamper the access to external, common and frequent financing to almost every country in the world.

We consider this meeting, in which Venezuelan debt holders from Venezuela, United States, Panama, United Kingdom, Portugal, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Japan and Germany took part, as highly positive and very auspicious. May this beginning of the refinancing process of our debt ratify our full intention to proceed in order to comply, as we have always done, with all our commitments, and overcome, through serious, clear and open mechanisms – undertaken in common with our bondholders – the complexities that have forcedly generated those who, from Trump’s administration and its Venezuelan political allies, seek to attack our economy and disturb the tranquility of our people. They have not achieved so; they will not achieve so, the positive atmosphere in which this refinancing process began, indicates that we will move forward and continue to build the Welfare State that the Venezuelan people deserves.